The papers in this volume are based on a 2006 Princeton University symposium in honor of Glen W. Bowersock on the occasion of his retirement from the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study. Here a distinguished international group of ancient historians explores the classical antiquity that Bowersock has given us over a scholarly career of almost fifty years.

The topics offered in East and West range throughout the ancient world from the second century bce to late antiquity, from Hellenistic Greece and Republican Rome to Egypt and Arabia, from the Second Sophistic to Roman imperial discourse, from Sulla’s self-presentation in his memoirs to charitable giving among the Manichaeans in Egypt.

This collection of essays represents the first attempt to take in Glen Bowersock’s well-developed scholarly interests as a whole. The contributors open up new avenues that often run well beyond the conventional geographical and temporal boundaries of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, leading to a host of fresh insights into antique thought and life.

In the early 1960s, fewer than five percent of Japanese owned automobiles, China's per capita income was among the lowest in Asia, and living standards in South Korea's rural areas were on par with some of the world's poorest countries. Today, these are three of the most powerful economies on earth. Dwight Perkins grapples with both the contemporary and historical causes and consequences of the turnaround, drawing on firsthand experience in the region to explain how Asian countries sustained such rapid economic growth in the second half of the twentieth century.

East Asian Development offers a comprehensive view of the region, from Japan and the "Asian Tigers" (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea) to Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and China--a behemoth larger than all the other economies combined. While the overall picture of Asian growth is positive, no single economic policy has been effective regionwide. Interventionist policies that worked well in some countries failed elsewhere. Perkins analyzes income distribution, to uncover why initially egalitarian societies have ended up in very different places, with Japan, for example, maintaining a modest gap between rich and poor while China has become one of Asia's most unequal economies.

Today, the once-dynamic Japanese and Korean economies are sluggish, and even China shows signs of losing steam. Perkins investigates whether this is a regional phenomenon or typical of all economies at this stage of development. His inquiry reminds us that the uncharted waters of China's vast economy make predictions of its future performance speculative at best.

This is the story of the largest Mexican-American community in the United States, the city within a city known as "East Los Angeles." How did this barrio of over one million men and women—occupying an area greater than Manhattan or Washington D.C.—come to be?

Although promoted early in this century as a workers' paradise, Los Angeles fared poorly in attracting European immigrants and American blue-collar workers. Wages were low, and these workers were understandably reluctant to come to a city which was also troubled by labor strife. Mexicans made up the difference, arriving in the city in massive numbers.

Who these Mexicans were and the conditions that caused them to leave their own country are revealed in East Los Angeles. The author examines how they adjusted to life in one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, how they fared in this country's labor market, and the problems of segregation and prejudice they confronted.

In 1950 a million Texans—more than a tenth of the entire population of the state—lived in a region where one family in every two earned less than $2,000 a year. Composing that region are the thirty-two counties of northeastern Texas in which the lumber industry is concentrated. In eleven of these counties, 70 percent of family incomes were less than $2,000.

Until 1930 the Texas lumber industry furnished employment for more workers than any other manufacturing in the state. Though displaced in that year by oil refining, it still ranks near the top in the number of workers it hires. The aim of this study is to show how these people whose economic life has been dominated by a single industry have fared for eighty years in comparison with their fellow Texans and with lumber workers in the Pacific Northwest and the Lakes states.

Texas lumber workers have always been in many ways a peculiar people, conditioned by their historical roots, by isolation from the mainstream of national life, and by the deeply rural nature of their environment. A typical group portrait would show two of each three persons to be adult white males. One of three would be African American. It would not show any women. Here and there a face would bear the marks of alien birth. Most of the figures, however, would be natives not only of America but of East Texas.

In family background, in work experience, and in social and economic environment these people have been uniquely homogeneous. In the early 1950s the Congressional Committee on the Economic Report of the President designated the area as one of “deep poverty” and pinpointed it as one which had failed notably to reach the level of living achieved by the state and the nation. Its economic status has been lower than that of any other group in Texas except household servants, and its education level has been well below that of the state and nation and increasingly below the level of acceptance in any jobs other than those requiring a minimum of training and competence. The immediate past has shown not only no improvement but a positive deterioration.

Drawing upon personal investigation and state and federal reports, the author has put the contemporary situation in a historical setting. Her delineation is principally in terms of figures that weave a social fabric from which definite patterns emerge—insecure wages, illiteracy and inefficient production, unsuccessful attempts to achieve effective organization. Though the book is directed primarily toward those who should feel concern at its revelations, it also suggests a wealth of untapped sources for the ethnographer and the folklorist.

First published in 1968, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience has become a classic in the field of American studies.

G. Edward White traces the origins of “the West of the imagination” to the adolescent experiences of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister—three Easterners from upper-class backgrounds who went West in the 1880s in search of an alternative way of life.

Each of the three men came to identify with a somewhat idealized “Wild West” that embodied the virtues of individualism, self-reliance, and rugged masculinity. When they returned East, they popularized this image of the West through art, literature, politics, and even their public personae. Moreover, these Western virtues soon became and have remained American virtues—a patriotic ideal that links Easterners with Westerners.

With a multidisciplinary blend of history, biography, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience will appeal to a wide audience. The author has written a new preface, offering additional perspectives on the mythology of the West and its effect on the American character.

A sweeping history of the American invention of modern money.

Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems—coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of these currencies have received little attention.

Dror Goldberg tells the story of modern money in North America through the Massachusetts colony during the seventeenth century. As the young settlement transitioned to self-governance and its economy grew, the need to formalize a smooth exchange emerged. Printing local money followed.

Easy Money illustrates how colonists invented contemporary currency by shifting its foundation from intrinsically valuable goods—such as silver—to the taxation of the state. Goldberg traces how this structure grew into a worldwide system in which, monetarily, we are all Massachusetts. Weaving economics, law, and American history, Easy Money is a new touchstone in the story of monetary systems.

In Eating Her Curries and Kway: A Cultural History of Food in Singapore, Nicole Tarulevicz argues that in a society that has undergone substantial change in a relatively short amount of time, food serves Singaporeans as a poignant connection to the past. Eating has provided a unifying practice for a diverse society, a metaphor for multiracialism and recognizable national symbols for a fledgling state. Covering the period from British settlement in 1819 to the present and focusing on the post–1965 postcolonial era, Tarulevicz tells the story of Singapore through the production and consumption of food.

Analyzing a variety of sources that range from cookbooks to architectural and city plans, Tarulevicz offer a thematic history of this unusual country, which was colonized by the British and operated as a port within Malaya, but which is without a substantial pre-colonial history. Connecting food culture to the larger history of Singapore, she discusses various topics including domesticity and home economics, housing and architecture, advertising, and the regulation of food-related manners and public behavior such as hawking, littering, and chewing gum. Moving away from the predominantly political and economic focus of other histories of Singapore, Eating Her Curries and Kway provides an important alternative reading of Singaporean society.

This book charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan. The process of transforming bamboo into paper involves production-related and social skills, as well as the everyday skills that allowed these papermakers to survive in an era of tumultuous change. The Chinese revolution—understood as a series of interconnected political, social, and technological transformations—was, Jacob Eyferth argues, as much about the redistribution of skill, knowledge, and technical control as it was about the redistribution of land and political power.

The larger context for this study is the “rural–urban divide”: the institutional, social, and economic cleavages that separate rural people from urbanites. This book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men. It asks how a vision of rural people as unskilled has affected their place in the body politic and contributed to their disenfranchisement. By viewing skill as a contested resource, subject to distribution struggles, it addresses the issue of how revolution, state-making, and marketization have changed rural China.

Eusebius of Caesarea, ca. 260–340 CE, born in Palestine, was a student of the presbyter Pamphilus whom he loyally supported during Diocletian's persecution. He was himself imprisoned in Egypt, but became Bishop of Caesarea about 314. At the Council of Nicaea in 325 he sat by the emperor, led a party of moderates, and made the first draft of the famous creed.

Of Eusebius's many learned publications we have Martyrs of Palestine and Life of Constantine; several apologetic and polemic works; parts of his commentaries on the Psalms and Isaiah; and the Chronographia, known chiefly in Armenian and Syriac versions of the original Greek. But Eusebius's chief fame rests on the History of the Christian Church in ten books published in 324–325, the most important ecclesiastical history of ancient times, a great treasury of knowledge about the early Church.

Bede “the Venerable,” English theologian and historian, was born in 672 or 673 CE in the territory of the single monastery at Wearmouth and Jarrow. He was ordained deacon (691–2) and priest (702–3) of the monastery, where his whole life was spent in devotion, choral singing, study, teaching, discussion, and writing. Besides Latin he knew Greek and possibly Hebrew.

Bede’s theological works were chiefly commentaries, mostly allegorical in method, based with acknowledgment on Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and others, but bearing his own personality. In another class were works on grammar and one on natural phenomena; special interest in the vexed question of Easter led him to write about the calendar and chronology. But his most admired production is his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Here a clear and simple style united with descriptive powers to produce an elegant work, and the facts diligently collected from good sources make it a valuable account.

Historical also are his Lives of the Abbots of his monastery, the less successful accounts (in verse and prose) of Cuthbert, and the Letter to Egbert his pupil (November 734), so important for our knowledge about the Church in Northumbria.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Bede’s historical works is in two volumes (the second of which includes Lives of the Abbots and Letter to Egbert).

Bede “the Venerable,” English theologian and historian, was born in 672 or 673 CE in the territory of the single monastery at Wearmouth and Jarrow. He was ordained deacon (691–2) and priest (702–3) of the monastery, where his whole life was spent in devotion, choral singing, study, teaching, discussion, and writing. Besides Latin he knew Greek and possibly Hebrew.

Bede’s theological works were chiefly commentaries, mostly allegorical in method, based with acknowledgment on Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and others, but bearing his own personality. In another class were works on grammar and one on natural phenomena; special interest in the vexed question of Easter led him to write about the calendar and chronology. But his most admired production is his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Here a clear and simple style united with descriptive powers to produce an elegant work, and the facts diligently collected from good sources make it a valuable account.

Historical also are his Lives of the Abbots of his monastery, the less successful accounts (in verse and prose) of Cuthbert, and the Letter to Egbert his pupil (November 734), so important for our knowledge about the Church in Northumbria.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Bede’s historical works is in two volumes.

From Lexington and Gettysburg to Normandy and Iraq, the wars of the United States have defined the nation. But after the guns fall silent, the army searches the lessons of past conflicts in order to prepare for the next clash of arms. In the echo of battle, the army develops the strategies, weapons, doctrine, and commanders that it hopes will guarantee a future victory.

In the face of radically new ways of waging war, Brian Linn surveys the past assumptions--and errors--that underlie the army's many visions of warfare up to the present day. He explores the army's forgotten heritage of deterrence, its long experience with counter-guerrilla operations, and its successive efforts to transform itself. Distinguishing three martial traditions--each with its own concept of warfare, its own strategic views, and its own excuses for failure--he locates the visionaries who prepared the army for its battlefield triumphs and the reactionaries whose mistakes contributed to its defeats.

Discussing commanders as diverse as Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Colin Powell, and technologies from coastal artillery to the Abrams tank, he shows how leadership and weaponry have continually altered the army's approach to conflict. And he demonstrates the army's habit of preparing for wars that seldom occur, while ignoring those it must actually fight. Based on exhaustive research and interviews, The Echo of Battle provides an unprecedented reinterpretation of how the U.S. Army has waged war in the past and how it is meeting the new challenges of tomorrow.

A renowned Renaissance poet’s homage to Naples makes its debut in modern English translation.

Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503), whose academic name was Gioviano, was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance as well as a leading statesman who served as prime minister to the Aragonese kings of southern Italy. The dominant literary figure of quattrocento Naples, Pontano produced literary works in several genres and was the leader of the Neapolitan academy. The two works included in the present volume, broadly inspired by Virgil, might be considered Pontano’s love songs to the landscapes of Naples. The Eclogues offer a spectacular, panoramic tour of the Bay of Naples region, even as they focus on intimate domestic scenes and allegorize the people and places of the poet’s world. The Garden of the Hesperides is a work of brilliant erudition on an unprecedented poetic topic: the cultivation of citrus trees and the splendid pleasures of gardens. This volume features a newly established Latin text of the Garden of the Hesperides as well as the first published translations of both works into English.

The clearest and most up-to-date account of the achievements—and setbacks—of the European Union since 1945.

Europe has been transformed since the Second World War. No longer a checkerboard of entirely sovereign states, the continent has become the largest single-market area in the world, with most of its members ceding certain economic and political powers to the central government of the European Union. This shift is the product of world-historical change, but the process is not well understood. The changes came in fits and starts. There was no single blueprint for reform; rather, the EU is the result of endless political turmoil and dazzling bureaucratic gymnastics. As Brexit demonstrates, there are occasional steps backward, too. Cutting through the complexity, Richard Pomfret presents a uniquely clear and comprehensive analysis of an incredible achievement in economic cooperation.

The Economic Integration of Europe follows all the major steps in the creation of the single market since the postwar establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community. Pomfret identifies four stages of development: the creation of a customs union, the deepening of economic union with the Single Market, the years of monetary union and eastward expansion, and, finally, problems of consolidation. Throughout, he details the economic benefits, costs, and controversies associated with each step in the evolution of the EU. What lies ahead? Pomfret concludes that, for all its problems, Europe has grown more prosperous from integration and is likely to increase its power on the global stage.

Charles Kindleberger, an international economic specialist, seeks in this book to show how economic history and economic analysis can interact, giving particular attention to the question of how history can be used in a comparative setting to test economic models for generality. His history and examples span the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The important and unexpected result is to show how the applicable economic model in given instances is strongly conditioned by social, socio-psychological, and political settings in which a given stimulus elicits a particular response. As a by-product, Kindleberger throws light on the political economy of Western European states, especially in international economic dimensions, but also in technological change, scientific education, and economic growth.

In these spirited and lucid essays, Kindleberger discusses related and abiding economic questions: whether the creation of a world financial center is inevitable; what the possible bases for free trade are; how insights can be gained into present day multinational corporations; and how information networks can maximize benefits in trade, and can affect the quality of output, costs, and economies of scale.

Part of the author's interest is methodological. He believes that the comparative method—studying the same rather restricted problem in comparable economies in a fixed regional and temporal setting—yields richer insights than those available from the history of the single economy. While his own studies are limited to merchants, tariffs, free trade, capital markets, and ports, a methodological introductory chapter discusses a wider range of applications.

In a brilliant recreation of the epoch between the 1770s and the 1820s, Emma Rothschild reinterprets the ideas of the great revolutionary political economists to show us the true landscape of economic and political thought in their day, with important consequences for our own. Her work alters the readings of Adam Smith and Condorcet--and of ideas of Enlightenment--that underlie much contemporary political thought.

Economic Sentiments takes up late-eighteenth-century disputes over the political economy of an enlightened, commercial society to show us how the "political" and the "economic" were intricately related to each other and to philosophical reflection. Rothschild examines theories of economic and political sentiments, and the reflection of these theories in the politics of enlightenment. A landmark in the history of economics and of political ideas, her book shows us the origins of laissez-faire economic thought and its relation to political conservatism in an unquiet world. In doing so, it casts a new light on our own times.

Brendan O’Flaherty brings the tools of economic analysis—incentives, equilibrium, optimization, and more—to bear on contentious issues of race in the United States. In areas ranging from quality of health care and education, to employment opportunities and housing, to levels of wealth and crime, he shows how racial differences among blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asian Americans remain a powerful determinant in the lives of twenty-first-century Americans. More capacious than standard texts, The Economics of Race in the United States discusses important aspects of history and culture and explores race as a social and biological construct to make a compelling argument for why race must play a major role in economic and public policy. People are not color-blind, and so policies cannot be color-blind either.

Because his book addresses many topics, not just a single area such as labor or housing, surprising threads of connection emerge in the course of O’Flaherty’s analysis. For example, eliminating discrimination in the workplace will not equalize earnings as long as educational achievement varies by race—and educational achievement will vary by race as long as housing and marriage markets vary by race. No single engine of racial equality in one area of social and economic life is strong enough to pull the entire train by itself. Progress in one place is often constrained by diminishing marginal returns in another. Good policies can make a difference, and only careful analysis can figure out which policies those are.

Religion has not been a popular target for economic analysis. Yet the tools of economics can offer deep insights into how religious groups compete, deliver social services, and reach out to potential converts—how, in daily life, religions nurture and deploy market power. Sriya Iyer puts these tools to use in an expansive, creative study of India, one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world.

Iyer explores how growth, inequality, education, technology, and social trends both affect and are affected by religious groups. Her exceptionally rich data—drawn from ten years of research, including a survey of almost 600 religious organizations in seven states—reveal the many ways religions interact with social welfare and political conflict. After India’s economy was liberalized in 1991, she shows, religious organizations substantially increased their provision of services, compensating for the retreat of the state. Iyer’s data also indicate that religious violence is more common where economic growth is higher, apparently because growth increases inequality, which sectarian politicians might exploit to encourage hostility toward other religions. As inequality leads to social polarization, religious doctrines become more extreme. But there are hopeful patterns in Iyer’s data, too. Religious organizations, on balance, play a positive role in India’s socioeconomic development, and women’s participation in religious life is on the rise.

The Economics of Religion in India has much to teach us about India and other pluralistic societies the world over, and about the power of economics to illuminate some of societies’ deepest beliefs and dynamics.